"'Soft earth deeply ploughed,'" Fanayal repeated, gazing upon her form with frank hunger. He turned to the lean and warlike men of his court. "Such are the temptations of evil, my friends!" he called, shaking his head. "Such are the temptations!"
More laughter greeted these words.
"Your sisters are dead," the Padirajah continued as if immune to her wiles. "Your temples are pulled down. If these are gifts, as you say, then I am in a most generous mood." He paused to make room for a few frail guffaws from his assembled men. "I could give you a noose, say, or a thousand lashes. Perhaps I will have Meppa show you what kind of prison your body can be."
Malowebi found himself wondering whether the woman had even blinked, so relentless was her gaze. The fact that Fanayal weathered it with such thoughtless ease actually troubled the Mbimayu sorcerer. Was the man simply oblivious or did he possess a heart every bit as hard as her own?
Either possibility would not bode an alliance well.
"My soul has already left and returned to this body," she said, her girlish voice scratched with the harsh intonations of a crone. "There is no torment you could inflict upon me."
"So hard!" Fanayal cried laughing. "Stubborn! Devil-worshipping witch!"
Again the desert court rumbled with laughter.
"I would not ply your body," Meppa said without warning. So far he had stood silent and motionless at his sovereign's side, his face directed forward as always. Only the asp, which curved like an onyx bow across his left cheek, faced the lone woman.
Psatma Nannaferi regarded the Cishaurim with a sneer. "My soul is beyond your devilry, Snakehead. I worship the Dread Mother."
Never had Malowebi witnessed an exchange more uncanny, the blinded man speaking as if to a void, the shackled woman as if she were a mad queen among hereditary slaves.
"You worship a demon."
The Mother-Supreme laughed with the bitter hilarity. The cackle rang across distant walls, echoed through the high crypt hollows, gelding all the humour that had come before it. Suddenly the assembled men were nothing but ridiculous boys, their pride swatted from them by the palm of a shrewd and exacting mother.
"Call her what you will!" Psatma Nannaferi exclaimed. "Demon? Yes! I worship a demon! — if it pleases you to call her such! You think we worship the Hundred because they are good? Madness governs the Outside, Snakehead, not gods or demons-or even the God! Fool! We worship them because they have power over us. And we-we Yatwerians-worship the one with the most power of all!"
Malowebi squelched another urge to call out, to urge the Fanim to spare her, to set her free, then to burn a hundred bulls in Yatwer's honour. The Mother was here! Here!
"Gods are naught but greater demons," the Cishaurim said, "hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?"
The woman's laughter trailed into a cunning smile. "Hungers indeed! The fat will be eaten, of course. But the high holy? The faithful? They shall be celebrated!"
Meppa's voice was no mean one, yet its timbre paled in the wake of the Mother-Supreme's clawing rasp. Even still he pressed, a tone of urgent sincerity the only finger he had to balance the scales. "We are a narcotic to them. They eat our smoke. They make jewellery of our thoughts and passions. They are beguiled by our torment, our ecstasy, so they collect us, pluck us like strings, make chords of nations, play the music of our anguish over endless ages. We have seen this, woman. We have seen this with our missing eyes!"
Malowebi scowled. Fanim madness… It had to be.
"Then you know," Psatma Nannaferi said in a growl that crawled across Malowebi's skin. "There will be no end to your eating, when She takes you. Your blood, your flesh-they are inexhaustible in death. Taste what little air you can breathe, Snakehead. You presume your Solitary God resembles you. You make your image the form of the One. You think you can trace lines, borders, through the Outside, like that fool, Sejenus, say what belongs to the God of Gods and what does not-errant abstractions! Hubris! The Goddess waits, Snakehead, and you are but a mote before her patience! Birth and War alone can seize-and seize She does!"
The Mbimayu sorcerer glanced out over the festooned court, his attention drawn by gasps and murmurs of outrage. The desert men watched, their faces caught between fury and horror. Several of them even signed small folk charms with their fingers. The oddities had been piled too high for them not to realize something profound was amiss.
"Stay your curses!" Fanayal cried, his humour finally beaten into fury.
She cackled in a manner far too savage for lips as young as hers. Dust plumed through a rare shaft of sunlight, star-scapes rolling on temple drafts. "Yes, Mother!" she shouted to the air the way Meppa might. "Seizing him would be a delight! Yes!"
"Demoness!" the Last Cishaurim bellowed. He descended the steps toward her, his face held forward as stiff as a doll's. "I know the true compass of your power. You are written across ages and yet you need tools — Men. And all Men can fail. It is the foundation of what we are! You will be broken with your tools! And you will starve in your pit!"
"Yes!" Psatma Nannaferi cackled once again. "All Men save one!"
Meppa lowered his face, as if only now seeing her through the etched silver of his band. "The White-Luck," he said.
"White-Luck?" Fanayal asked.
Malowebi stood breathless in the wake of the question. These Fanim barbarians could not fathom the disaster they courted. The Hundred. The Hundred rode to war!
"There are infinite paths through the tumble of events," Meppa explained to his sovereign. "The White-Luck, the idolaters believe, is that perfect line of action and happenstance that can see any outcome come to pass. The White-Luck Warrior is the man who walks that line. Everything that he needs, happens, not because he wills it but because his need is identical to what happens. Every step, every toss of the number-sticks, is a…" He turned back to the fierce glare of the Yatwerian Mother-Supreme.
"Is a what?" Fanayal demanded.
Meppa shrugged. "A gift."
The diminutive woman cackled and rattled her chains for stamping her feet. "You are but a temporary blight! A trial that sorts the faithful from the thieves. A far greater war has seized the Three Seas. The Goddess has broken the yoke of the Thousand Temples. The Cults arm themselves for battle. Ride, Fanim fool! Ride! Conquer what you can! Death and horror will eat you all ere this ends!"
Fanayal ab Kascamandri raised his hand as if trying to snatch words she had tossed aside. "So this White-Luck Warrior of yours," he snapped, "he hunts the Aspect-Emperor?"
"The Goddess hunts the Demon."
Fanayal turned to his Cishaurim and grinned. "Tell me, Meppa. Do you like her?"
"Like her?" the blind man responded, obviously too accustomed to his jokes to be incredulous. "No."
"Well I do," the Padirajah said. "Even her curses please me."
"So she is to be spared?"
"She knows things, Meppa. Things we need to know."
But Malowebi, his skin crawling with gooseflesh, understood, as did every man present save perhaps the Cishaurim: the Bandit Padirajah simply made excuses. For all her provocations, for all her deadliness, Psatma Nannaferi remained, as she had said, soft earth deeply ploughed…
And the dread Mother of Birth would work her inscrutable will.
Momemn
Grief had crippled her. Grief for the death of her youngest, her sweetest and most vulnerable, Samarmas. Grief for the loss of her oldest, her bitterest and most wronged, Mimara.